AUTHORITIES IN Chile exhumed the remains of Salvador Allende yesterday in a bid to discover whether the former president committed suicide or was murdered by soldiers during a bloody coup in 1973.
The move was ordered by a judge seeking to resolve the mystery that has surrounded Allende’s final hours and is part of a wider investigation into the murder of hundreds of people during the first weeks of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Officially Allende shot himself with an AK-47 given to him as a present by Cuba’s Fidel Castro rather than surrender to the mutinous forces bombarding his presidential palace. But many in Chile refuse to believe a version of events first divulged by the military, especially as the dictatorship refused to allow Allende’s family view his corpse.
An autopsy will now be carried out by seven Chilean forensic experts. In an attempt to ensure the results are widely accepted they will be accompanied by five foreign specialists.
The coup of 1973 and the murder and disappearance of more than 3,000 people during the Pinochet dictatorship remains a deeply divisive issue in Chile. The first Marxist leader to come to power through the ballot box, Allende remains a powerful symbol across the South American left of radical democratic change.
But for many of Chile’s middle class and elite he was a dangerous revolutionary who wanted to turn the country into a version of communist Cuba. He was also viewed with deep distrust by the US.
Fearing the spread of communism in the western hemisphere, Washington gave its support to the coup.
The forensic team carrying out the autopsy will first confirm that the remains are indeed those of Allende before seeking to establish the cause of death. Senator Isabel Allende, the daughter of the former president, attended the removal of her father’s remains along with other family members and leading political figures from Chile’s left.
She said that while the family supported the exhumation any conclusion from the autopsy would not change the fact that her father died “in the context of a bombardment and assault of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, in a situation of extreme violence, which affected as well thousands of members and supporters of the constitutional government”.
Last year a judge ruled that Allende’s predecessor as president was murdered by the Pinochet regime. Eduardo Frei Senior was investigating human rights abuses by the dictatorship at the time of his death from a supposed illness in 1982. The judge investigating the case ruled that he was poisoned in order to silence him.
There are also calls in Chile to investigate the death of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda who died 12 days after the coup. The Neruda Foundation says the poet died of prostate cancer. But Manuel Araya, his personal assistant, earlier this month claimed he was assassinated by the military in order to stop him going into exile in Mexico. A life-long communist, Neruda was a high-profile supporter of Allende.